Mister Impossible

by Maggie Stiefvater

  Declan held his hand out to Jordan, the universal gesture for After you?

  “How are they made?” Jordan asked. “How is it put into them? Do you know?”

  Mikkel squinted, as if the question wasn’t exactly logical to him, but then he answered, slowly, “Oh, I see what you are saying. The artist does it. It is something about how they are feeling when they make the art. I thought when I first saw one that it was because the art was special to the world in some way. A real original, you know? But it was explained to me later and this makes more sense. They are special to the artist in some way. They are an original for the artist, something new for them, something personal for them. The subject matter, sometimes, how they felt when they were painting it, others. That is what seems to make some of them into sweetmetals. I do not think it is the artist who does it. It is, like, the spirit of the time. There is a French term for that, isn’t there? There is a French term for everything. Does that answer the question?”

  Declan looked to Jordan to see if it did.

  “And you don’t know what this is, what the specific bit is about the artist’s process that does it,” she said. “You don’t know anything more specific about this … spirit of the time.”

  “All I know is that artists who produce sweetmetals don’t always make sweetmetals,” he said. “They can make two in a row, maybe, and then none for the rest of time. Now, most of them are in private hands … but you know there are a few in the city, right? Open to the public?”

  “El Jaleo,” Declan said.

  “Yes,” Mikkel said. “Sargent was good at them, but I suppose he was very prolific, too, wasn’t he? Have you ever seen his Madame X?”

  Of course she had. Of course. Madame X was Sargent’s self-proclaimed masterpiece, with all its checkered history. It was one of the first Sargents Jordan had ever tried to copy. She and Hennessy had taken turns at it, sometimes even working on the same copy as they did it over and over again. There was a full-length copy of it back in the McLean mansion with a bunch of bullet holes in its head, just like the poor girls who might still be there, too.

  Mikkel saw from their expressions they had. “It’s a sweetmetal, too. Off the charts. Whatever those two have in common, that’s what makes a sweetmetal.”

  His teen son jogged up to give Mikkel his house keys; he’d locked away the portrait of Declan’s mother safely inside the house.

  “Thank you for making the time before your trip,” Declan said.

  “Thank you for facilitating,” Mikkel replied. “I’m sure we’ll be in touch again. That text number is good for you, right?”

  Handshakes were exchanged again, more murmured pleasantries, and then, finally, Declan, Jordan, and Matthew were left standing on the pier. The wind whipped at them. The masts behind them were skeletons. The pretty evening was turning into something even more feral.

  “It’s kind of weird that water shows you your own face,” Matthew said, but in an absent way.

  Jordan said, “That was the painting of your mother.”

  “Yes,” Declan said. “It still is. I just don’t have it anymore.”

  “You traded it for this information.”

  “Yes.”

  They studied each other. He looked less ordinary as the sun disappeared and deepened the shadows beneath his eyebrows, obscuring the shape of his eyes, his expression.

  “This was a good time, Pozzi,” she told him.

  Declan turned his face into the wind so that the darkness would hide his smile from her. He said, “I expect great things from my portrait.”

  Hennessy knew that everyone had secrets.

  Secrets were what made you who you were. Once, Hennessy had read a book on drawing that said the key to getting a good likeness was getting the shadows right. It wasn’t by the positive forms that one was recognized. We know people’s faces by their shadows.

  Hennessy thought secrets were like that. Each of her girls started life as Hennessy, thinking like her, acting like her—but eventually something happened, and they got a secret. And that was when they became their own person.

  It was possible Hennessy believed people simply were their secrets.

  J. H. Hennessy’s secret was that she could only love one person at a time. It might appear as if she loved other people, like her daughter, or other activities, like painting, but she really only loved Bill Dower. Everything went well for painting and for Hennessy as long as everything was going well with Bill Dower. But if it wasn’t, anything could be sacrificed in the service of preserving that love. Daughter, career, friends, house—these were just well-treated pawns in a board game with only two players.

  Jordan’s secret was that she wanted to live apart from Hennessy. She might have denied this to save Hennessy’s feelings, but Hennessy had followed her; she’d seen the apartments Jordan daydreamed about. She’d looked through Jordan’s phone as she slept and seen the zip codes she fantasized over. She knew the galleries Jordan ogled, she knew the schools Jordan pictured herself attending. No matter how exciting Hennessy made their lives, no matter how many high-end jobs she had them take, how many lowbrow parties she had them attend, how big she made their shared life, Jordan still wanted her own. No one wanted to live with Hennessy forever, not even Hennessy.

  Hennessy’s secret was that she didn’t want the ley line to get any more powerful.

  “When one engages in havoc all the time,” Hennessy said, “it becomes a kind of unhavoc.”

  The three dreamers were in an older neighborhood. Hennessy had long since lost sense of where. City and state were all negotiable. The light was peculiar and yellow-green. It was the end of the day, which ordinarily made ugly places more paintable. But tonight the clouds were hanging low and wrong over this town, raggedly caught on telephone wires, and the last of the dying sun came in sideways and murky. Snow was drifting down here and there as if the clouds were sloughing. The streets were muddy with fallen and melted snow and sand.

  It was ugly. Unpaintably ugly.

  Hennessy went on. “The very act of disruption instead becomes the opposite, ruption, the act of maintaining the status quo, because the status quo has now become chaos. Now, if one wants to prove themselves a game changer, they instead must restore order. What a mindfuck! To—”

  “Are you saying that you need a break after this?” Bryde interrupted.

  “I was making some psychological observations. As conversation. To fill the time.”

  “What do you feel?” Bryde asked.

  Ronan let out a noisy breath as he drummed his fingers against the window. He had been getting more and more restless these past few days. Knees jiggling. Fingers drumming. Pacing. Jumping on top of shit. Jumping off of shit. He dreamt when they needed to dream. Otherwise he didn’t sleep at all. Hennessy thought this game of dominos was changing him. Or perhaps revealing him.

  “It’s fucking weird,” he said.

  It was hard to feel the true strength of the ley line here, because there were so many things Hennessy now knew obscured it. Low unshielded telephone lines, standing oily water puddled in pitted asphalt, houses crowded on top of each other with wires trailing from them like guts. Satellite dishes sprouted like dark mushrooms from some of the roofs. There was something else, though, that made it truly ugly, and Hennessy couldn’t quite figure out what it was. Maybe it was just her mood.

  “Hennessy,” Bryde said sharply, turning from the passenger seat to look at her in the back. “What do you feel?”

  “What Ronan Lynch said,” Hennessy replied. “Something’s janky.”

  Bryde said, “This will be a difficult one. Three large buildings will need to be leveled. I don’t know how well we will be able to dream when we are at the site, so we may need to use things we already have. We will need to stay focused. I may need you to do this one on your own. I don’t know yet.”

  Ronan caught Hennessy’s eye in the rearview mirror; his thick eyebrows went up. This was unusual. She shrugged.

  “In
fact,” Bryde said, “I need one of you to drive us there, just in case.”

  Need. Need one of you to drive. Bryde didn’t need them for anything. They needed him.

  But this evening, Bryde pulled Burrito into an uneven parking lot in front of a closed lumber yard. As Ronan and Hennessy briefly scuffled over who would drive in his place—Hennessy won (Ronan was distracted keeping Chainsaw inside the car)—Bryde climbed into the backseat.

  After the door shut behind him, Ronan hissed, “What’s going on here?”

  “Do I look like his minder?” Hennessy replied. “You ask him.”

  They got back in. They did not ask him. No one said anything as they drove through the ugly town and through a few minutes of patchily occupied countryside. The rutted road suddenly ended at a dark, freshly paved entrance to a corporate facility of some kind. A very clean white sign read, simply, DIGITAL SOLUTIONS.

  Hennessy glanced into the rearview mirror at Bryde. In the green-yellow light she saw only that he was sitting perfectly still as he looked out the window, his eyes squinted as if against sun.

  DIGITAL SOLUTIONS turned out to be a complex of three unassuming but enormous white buildings in the middle of a well-tended parking lot. In every way it seemed less ugly than the town they’d left behind. Neatly mowed grass that seemed too green for this time of year. Black, black asphalt that was level as glass. Clean white sides on the buildings, each printed with the same ambiguous words: DIGITAL SOLUTIONS.

  Hennessy took the opportunity of the empty parking lot to do a few donuts in Burrito, hoping to make her ugly mood dizzy enough to fall down and not get back up again, but eventually she had to stop. Her ears were ringing.

  She yawned to clear them, then yawned again. They kept ringing. It was a little like when you’d hit your head and you were struggling against vertigo. It was also a little like when you’d left the television on but turned the sound down. It was also a little like a refrigerator.

  She yanked up the parking brake. The snow floated like ash in front of the windshield and melted on the fake-looking grass. Her ears continued to ring. “What’s that sound?”

  Ronan said, “Fuck if I know. I thought it was me.”

  The sound continued. It was a strange sound, a yellow-green sound that matched the yellow-green afternoon. There were no cars in the lot. No people. No signs of life. Just the ragged clouds and the sickly color bleeding at the horizon. Those clumpy snowflakes that melted straight to grime.

  Outside the car, the sound was even louder. It was the unending, unchanging nature of it that was the most harrowing, she thought. It never varied, so it became part of you. Pressing in, pressing out. From the air. From the ground. From the buildings. Ronan’s raven flapped into the air briefly before returning to the asphalt to stand stupidly, shaking her head like something clung to it.

  Ronan joined Hennessy, and they stood shoulder to shoulder, eyeing the buildings, the parking lot lights, the identical buildings with their identical lobby entrances made of black glass, all simple as a child’s drawing. The sound continued to come from everywhere. It seemed obvious there was nothing living here. One could not ask for a more complete opposite to the silent, vital forest around Ilidorin.

  “What powers the world, bro?” Hennessy said, suddenly understanding what she was looking at. “Zeros and ones. Memes and giggles. Forums and Fortnite. Right? It’s a—what do you call it. Data farm. Server farm.”

  “A what?”

  “I’ll bet you my fine ass that inside those buildings are banks and banks of servers,” Hennessy said. “Facebook-Instabook-Twitterbook-Tiktokbook-Tumblrbook. This is one of their hive minds. I could be wrong but I don’t think I am. I saw an art exhibit once about a guy who tried to sue a sound.”

  “Servers make noise?” Ronan asked. He answered his own question. “Cooling fans.”

  “That’s it, Mister Fixit.”

  “I can’t dream here,” Ronan said, matter-of-fact. “It would be a shitshow of epic proportions. We have to take it down with what we already have. Too bad you gave your sword to the Mods. Do we need to take down the whole building or just everything in it? Bryde?”

  But Bryde didn’t reply. He hadn’t joined them at the front of the car.

  They turned to look.

  The car’s rear door hung open. Bryde had made it out, but not by much. He was sort of crouched in the diffuse shadow of the open car door. Sort of standing. His body was curved in a question mark. It quivered. His fingers were cages over his ears.

  He was screaming.

  Or at least he looked like he was screaming. With his hands over his ears he screamed and screamed again, but without sound. It was all the agony of a howl without any of the noise, which somehow made it worse. It was like the sound of the server farm and the scream were a thing happening to Bryde; it made him a different person. Somehow less present. Projected in from a different location.

  They did not need to be told that it was hurting him.

  What do you hear?

  Ronan seemed shaken, too, but it was with a voice full of bravado that he turned his face away from Bryde and said, “It’s up to us, then.”

  “We can just go,” Hennessy said. “Leave this untouched. Tell him we did it. Maybe he won’t notice.”

  Ronan gave her a look. “The car. Let’s drive Burrito through.”

  “Through that glass and stuff? Is it tough enough for that?”

  “Please.” Ronan gave her another look. “Are you coming or are you waiting here?”

  “Are we taking him?”

  They looked back at Bryde. It was strange to see him still pinned in place. Was it possible for a sound to kill someone? Was it possible for something to kill Bryde? Older than he imagines, she remembered him saying.

  She told Ronan, “Go on, I’ll watch. I’ll give you a score. Perfect ten is the car comes out without a scratch. Nine if you bust a mirror off. It goes down from there. One is if we have to walk through that town, which, I have to say, reminds me of Pennsylvania.”

  “We’re in Pennsylvania,” Ronan said.

  “That settles it.”

  Hennessy stood in the parking lot as Ronan drove the car away from them both, expertly spinning it to the left to slam the still-open back door shut. The car instantly became hard to see, even though she could hear the pounding bass of music from within it. It was not enough to drown out the complex’s sound, which was still everywhere. Inside her. Inescapable. Unrelenting. It required no human hands to do its work; it was in there powering that sound all by itself, working away at Bryde without feeling or pause.

  Humans were so good at pollution. The best.

  Suddenly, a massive hole appeared in the dark glass lobby doors of the closest building. Ronan had driven right in. For just a moment, Burrito was visible in the reflection of the remaining glass, and then it winked out of view. Crashing sounded from within the building.

  Minutes passed.

  Although it was impossible to see what was happening, it was nonetheless obvious that something was happening, because the terrible sound had gotten a little quieter, replaced now by security alarms. Bryde had stopped screaming and instead was simply hunched, eyes closed in pain, hands still over ears.

  Hennessy missed the moment of Burrito emerging from the first building, but she saw the moment it crashed into the second. That shivering glass, that brief reflection. Again, as Ronan did his work inside the building, the terrible sound went down another notch, replaced by yet more ordinary howling of alarms. She wondered if they were hooked up to anything. She wondered if she’d need to bedazzle any security forces with one of Bryde’s silver orbs. She examined her conscience to see if she would be willing to rummage in Bryde’s jacket to retrieve one of the orbs while he stood there. Hennessy ordinarily had no problem violating people’s personal space, but with Bryde, it felt wrong. This, she thought, was probably related to Bryde’s secrets.

  By the time Ronan and Burrito crashed into the third building, Bryde h
ad lowered his hands from his ears and simply stood, staring dead-eyed and haggard off into the distance.

  Then the terrible sound was gone and so were the alarms, so Ronan must have destroyed those, too. There was only the sound of an unmanned business park several miles away from an ugly town. Distant trucks. Faraway heating and air-conditioning units. Tractors and birds.

  This time the ley’s surge was so powerful that it nearly knocked Hennessy right off her feet.

  It was less that she was physically struck and more like the ground beneath her feet suddenly seemed unimportant. She was a part of a huge, ancient thing that was slowly stretching, slowly coming back to life, and she suddenly thought she understood in a very real way why the Moderators were doing everything in their power to catch them.

  Bryde looked nearly like himself as the sound of Burrito’s engine drew near. The car was still hard to see, but Hennessy guessed that Ronan hadn’t lost a mirror. Burrito was strong. Ronan was strong. Hennessy was strong. They were all very, very strong.

  And getting stronger all the time.

  The ley line was singing through her even louder than that server farm had, only it was worse, because she knew this feeling meant she could manifest so, so much of the Lace.

  Bryde said, in a low voice, “Have you guessed my secret, Hennessy?”

  Hennessy studied Bryde. Again, she thought about how unusual a person he was. He was a little like the car, hard to look at. Hard to see. Or maybe she was just thinking that now that she’d seen him screaming, it was hard to look at him the same way. She said, “Is this a game?”

  He closed his eyes. He was still hurting a little, she could tell. In a stiff voice, he said, “It’s all a big game. We’re pieces.” Then he opened his eyes again. “You asked for a rest. We are nearly to the end.”